Fair Warning: This topic is purely for readers who are geeky by nature and have vague idea on the subject. This is not just How-To Series or MIUI Class series to take you through MIUI OS.

That said, Ken Mingis is Executive Editor at Computerworld quotes, "If artificial intelligence (AI) is the Holy Grail of software development, machine learning is its real-world, less-sexy cousin." To decipher in plain text, AI that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals, whereas machine learning uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to "learn" with data, without being explicitly programmed. Everyone wants to talk about AI. However, all we talk about is actually ML not AI or big data or in some case analytics. I'm not going to focus on Deep learning today so that I do not confuse readers. Was it plain enough? if not, well I tried.

On the contrary, these two are face of the same coin. But definitely not the same. Although some might argue otherwise, here is my viewpoint.

Well, for starters, machine learning is already in use as algorithms tackle everything from data security to financial transactions to app development, online search and even the directions you get from your smartphone. Did you just say “OK Google” or “Hi Alexa”? I also believe few of the Mi devices are already equipped with AI algorithms, say like in Camera to use them as sensors. Apple has it in X version. If you have heard of name “neural engine” to handle the phone’s artificial neural networks for images and speech processing. This is more of supervised and less of unsupervised machine learning. Data is fed into the system and we expect the outcome is more statistical using refiners on the data set it has rather than judgemental which basically human way of taking decisions.

Hence the casual term called “Learning” not intelligence. It’s just a tool to lessen human errors trained to specific task with accuracy. Say for example I have large data collated for very long time; eventually we will be able to get very refined results based on the “Learning”. However, what you will not get the any other kind of results where you do not have enough data.

Let me give you a best example: Say you are playing Chess online. What the program can do is, based on the executed move, the system picks the best possible counter move based on the amount data it has collected over time. What it cannot do is tell you a story or a sing a song for you. It will only do that one thing. Just predict!

When it comes to AI, it’s more of promising term or aspirational. What came to my mind a decade back was Terminator from Arnold or sentinel guarding your Space odyssey or something developed by SKYNET. I can confidently say that these are not AI. More like AI doesn’t exist as we hope to see it yet. It’s classified as applied or general.

While applied AI works closely with machine learning but focus to task specific, general AI can contemplate various data sets and variables and produce results just like human judgement. More like action oriented.

Let me try to explain you this in another way. Say, “AI” is telling that it’s going to rain and also tells you to carry umbrella. What actually happening is, these data is simply inputted to the system by you or me to understand the metadata and pickup best possible resolution.

Be that “OK Google, Hey Alexa, Siri, or Cortana” cannot executed things or answer if the data is not pre-loaded (period).

In a nut shell, machine learning works by just going through the metadata or with large database of particular data types and just identify the object which doesn’t seems like intelligent, as because it is not applying any analytical thinking as humans do. On the other hand AI is expected to learn outside the data set and variables preloaded. As a common man, I like AI as “what we can’t do today”, which could also mean we will never have AI. Or the until the robots kill us all

Very interesting topic @Iyengar
This topic is quite related to my current job, where I am a software developer for mobile robot (MR) in a semiconductor factory.
Those from manufacturing team always thought that we are implementing AI into their robots.
In facts, I am just develop predefined logic into MR, which define all the decision making by these robots.
And my work is not even considered as machine learning LOL!